CAT 2025 Slot 2 · VARC · Question 5

CAT 2025 Slot 2 previous year question on Sentence Completion and Insertion, with the answer and a step-by-step solution.

Sentence Completion and InsertionVerbal AbilityMultiple choiceHard

The given sentence is missing in the paragraph below. Decide where it best fits among the options 1, 2, 3, or 4 indicated in the paragraph.

Sentence: While taste is related to judgment, with thinkers at the time often writing, for example, about "judgments of taste" or using the two terms interchangeably, taste retains a vital link to pleasure, embodiment, and personal specificity that is too often elided in post-Kantian ideas about judgment—a link that Arendt herself was working to restore.

Paragraph: ____(1) ____. Denneny focused on taste rather than judgment in order to highlight what he believed was a crucial but neglected historical change. ____(2) ____. Over the course of the seventeenth century and early eighteenth century, across Western Europe, the word taste took on a new extension of meaning, no longer referring specifically to gustatory sensation and the delights of the palate but becoming, for a time, one of the central categories for aesthetic—and ethical—thinking. ____(3) ____. Tracing the history of taste in Spanish, French, and British aesthetic theory, as Denneny did, also provides a means to recover the compelling and relevant writing of a set of thinkers who have been largely neglected by professional philosophy. ____(4) ____.

  1. A

    Option 3

  2. B

    Option 4

  3. C

    Option 1

  4. D

    Option 2

Pick an option, then check.
Answer & solution

Answer: Option A

The missing sentence carries two ideas: taste is linked to judgment but keeps a tie to pleasure, embodiment and personal specificity; and that tie is lost in post-Kantian thought, a loss Arendt was working to repair.

Blank 1 comes before the sentence about Denneny focusing on taste rather than judgment in order to highlight a 'crucial but neglected historical change'. The missing sentence is not about a historical change, so it does not set that sentence up.

Blank 2 sits between Denneny's 'neglected historical change' and the sentence that spells that change out – taste shifting in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries from gustatory sensation to an aesthetic and ethical category. Those two sentences belong back to back; inserting anything between them breaks a direct claim-and-explanation pair.

Blank 3 follows that explanation and precedes the sentence about recovering thinkers 'largely neglected by professional philosophy'. Both neighbours fit. The sentence before it ends on taste as a category for aesthetic and ethical thinking, which is the link to judgment the missing sentence opens with; and the missing sentence ends on thinkers whose insight was elided after Kant, which is picked up at once by the neglected thinkers in the sentence after. The missing sentence is held on both sides.

Blank 4 is the last slot, after the paragraph has moved on to Spanish, French and British aesthetic theory. A sentence introducing the conceptual relation between taste and judgment cannot close that out.

Shortcut: for a placement question, test each blank for a double anchor – a link backwards and a link forwards. A blank with only one anchor is a trap; only blank 3 has both.

The answer is 'Option 3', which is listed first. Hence, the answer is option 1.

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